


I Came Out Here Cause I Was Told To

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld
Genre: Gen, The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, wear the lilac
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24364495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: “What could I prove, and to what end would I prove it?” -Havelock Vetinari, Night Watch
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	I Came Out Here Cause I Was Told To

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a line from “On My Own” in the original book of the musical Les Miserables which was later changed to “without a face to say hello to”

Look at the rooftops. They’re doused in the kind of sunlight that picks out old beer bottles and fish and chips packets in high resolution. In another Trouser of Time someone is writing a poem about these rooftops in this sunlight called “From Misbegot Bridge.” 

The streets below are impassable. Everyone is trying to get somewhere else and no one is succeeding. The barricades are slowly being taken down. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to set up ramps and ladders and save the property negotiations for the afternoon. 

On the rooftops someone is running. They’re choosing the longest straightaways to maintain a flat sprint. Sweating in black velvet, silent slippers have been exchanged for boots with rubber soles to get better traction on tiles and plaster. Breathing quietly they scan the city below. Something changes in the blink of an eye. Someone’s vanished. One person? The number of bodies below, fallen and upright, has decreased by one. The Assassin on the roof pivots and drops into a crouch, inspecting the scene more minutely. 

Sam Vimes didn’t see Sergeant Keel fall. He turned around and saw blood on armor. He reached toward the older man and felt cold skin. He’d heard the phrase “cold as the grave” but never known what felt like before now. Physically repulsed, he recoiled. Behind him he heard the sound of boots dropping onto the cobbles. He turned to see a tall, slim Assassin, trying and failing to force a smile of open friendliness into an expression of artistically grim determination. The strain of the day finally catching up with him, Sam fainted.

Havelock turned to the strange-looking, strange-smelling child in the frilly blouse who was evidently a newcomer on the scene and asked “I don’t really look that horrible, do I?” 

Nobby shook his head. 

The fight was continuing around him. Havelock could feel the wave of despair at his failure building to something he recognized as rage.

Interesting. 

Everyone Snapcase’s men were fighting wore a lilac. A field uniform. So did several of the bodies on the ground. It was a battle. Tyranny versus revolution. The battle that hadn’t happened in the People’s Republic of Treacle Mind Road. 

Taking a flower from a fallen comrade was Romantic but it felt wrong to take the symbol from a dead man he had never met. He pointed at the boy who had fainted and looked at someone who seemed to be trying hang back in the fight. “Take him somewhere safe,” he said.

“But shouldn’t I keep fi—“ Fred Colon began, but the Assassin’s icy glare cut him off. 

“Take him somewhere safe,” Havelock repeated, plucking the flower from Sam’s helmet and placing it between his teeth. 

Colon carried away the skinny teenager, glancing back at the assassin drawing his sword, thinking _if looks could kill_.

It was a small, thin sword, nearly a stiletto, designed for close quarters. Indeed, there was some debate in the Guild as to whether it even qualified as a sword in the hands of someone as long-limbed as Havelock Vetinari. 

He moved like a viper, or, more accurately, he moved like the future salutatorian of the Assassins’ Guild Class of ‘68. Lilac in his mouth, he turned his blade on the regime he had brought into existence only a few hours ago. 

But he knew, even as he fought, that this wasn’t his story. The men around him were fighting for something deeper and realer than ideals and dreams. They had a true loyalty to the man he had been sent to warn. It was, in a way, the least he could do. 

After they won, he melted into the shadows. He felt shaken and strangely hollow. Four days ago he’d never killed anyone, now there were nine*, or at least seven, people dead because of him. He hadn’t meant to kill the bodyguards. You weren't ALLOWED to kill bodyguards. How was he supposed to know they were deathly allergic to pine splinters?

Aunt Bobbi had such high hopes for Sergeant Keel. They wouldn’t have to play the long game, they could be closer to the world they imagined within a couple years. All that was gone now. They were back to Plan A. Sometimes, in the dark and selfish parts of his soul that he had boarded up and labelled “evil” he felt like a sacrificial lamb. He’d done a doodle in the margins of a Klatchian assignment of a scrawny horse—he’d meant it be a cat or dog but it had turned into a horse—with a coronet around its neck chained to a field of mud and cabbages. He’d torn up the drawing and re-written the assignment. 

He just wondered why he felt like he’d lost somebody who knew him.

*the Assassin who had tried to kill Sergeant Keel, Lord Winder’s two bodyguards, Lord Winder, four of Snapcase’s men, and Sergeant Keel

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] I Came Out Here Cause I Was Told To](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26293552) by [Elsinore_and_Inverness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness)




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